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Diabetes and Your Heart: the Connection

Posted on: March 12, 2019

If you or someone you love has been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, managing common symptoms like fatigue and increased hunger may be your most immediate concern.

What you may not be aware of, however, is that heart disease and stroke are also linked to diabetes. Health experts want patients to make that connection, because adults with type 2 diabetes are two to four times more likely to have heart disease or a stroke compared with adults who do not have diabetes, according to the American Heart Association.

Physicians urge patients with diabetes and prediabetes to stay up-to-date on their screenings for both their diabetes treatment and heart disease. Because type 2 diabetes is a “silent killer” that can take 10 years to fully develop, screening is essential since so many patients are unaware they have the disease. A fasting blood sugar over 125 (fasting plasma blood glucose level over 125 mg/ dL) would give you a diagnosis, but it should be followed up with a second test. The current recommendation is to start having a blood test for blood glucose at age 45.

People with a family history of type 2 diabetes or who are Asian American, African American or Native American and women who had gestational diabetes or gave birth to a large child should be checked at younger ages.

When type 2 diabetes is diagnosed, doctors often treat patients as if they’ve already had a heart attack even if they haven’t. That means aggressively addressing high blood glucose levels, blood pressure and cholesterol.

In fact, patients who have both hypertension and diabetes are at double the risk for cardiovascular disease, according to the AHA. In addition, having low HDL (“good”) cholesterol, high LDL (“bad”) cholesterol and high triglycerides is an unhealthy combination often found in people with diabetes and is linked to coronary heart disease.

Patients with diabetes should monitor their blood sugar levels, get more exercise (even if it doesn’t mean a gym routine), quit smoking if that’s a habit, and work with their physicians to get their cholesterol and blood sugar levels down.

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